The Uncomfortable Body

The Uncomfortable Body is a photographic project that reflects on masculinities and on relationships between men from a bodily, sensitive, and non-normative perspective. The work does not focus on sexual orientation, but rather on how male bodies relate to one another under a set of learned mandates: toughness, control, emotional distance, and the denial of contact and tenderness. I invited men who did not know each other to share a space, and later asked them what sensations remained with them. From those responses emerged the initial images of this project. The Uncomfortable Body is born from absences and silences. A body that learned to hide itself, a forbidden territory where touch was suspicion and tenderness a risk. They do not know each other, yet they share the same space: skin, temperature, perspiration, the weight of a sustained gaze. Masculinity, stripped of certainties, becomes a question: what does it mean to inhabit a body without fear? Photography reveals what modesty conceals and dismantles what mandate imposes. There is no pose—only the unease of what is genuine, the fragility of the real.